Blockchain Goes to Work

May 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week I’ve re-worked a post from last August in the first of a two-part consideration on the future of work. Today, it’s envisioning a workforce where more of us will be working for ourselves, selling increments of our time and talent in what amounts to a series of paying jobs. While it’s a response to the loss of “traditional jobs” to automation, it also holds the promise of greater autonomy, abundance and prosperity if we choose to value the right things by standing up for and safeguarding our human priorities along the way.

The future of work is being designed today. Perhaps the most exciting part is that each one of us has a role to play–is part of a broader negotiation–about how that future should unfold.

1 An Optimistic Vision

The future of work has never looked more abundant, although many don’t see it that way.

Some are busy projecting job losses from automation and brain-replacing artificial intelligence, telling us we’ll all be idled and that much poorer for it. Or they’re identifying the brainpower careers that will remain so we can point ourselves or our tuition payments in their direction. For these forecasters, the future of work is at best the pursuit of diminishing returns.

Some of the most pessimistic (or politically ambitious) among them have been formulating universal income plans to replace today’s more limited safety nets. They tell us that a stipend like this will liberate us to pursue our passions since new government checks will cover our basic necessities. This seems misguided to me. As George Orwell noted, some utopians simply cannot “imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain.”

An alternate vision focuses on innovations that could enable us to do more and better work while unlocking greater prosperity.

One of the enabling technologies that is already ushering in this future is blockchain. Like the protocols for transmitting data across digital networks led to the Internet, blockchain-based software applications could fundamentally change the ways that we work.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most commonly with no central monitor or regulator. The technology enables every block in the chain to record data that can be seen and reviewed by every other block, maintaining its accuracy through its security protections and transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in a digital ledger or transaction log. The need for and costs of a “middleman” (like a bank) and other impediments (like legal and financial gatekeepers) are avoided. Unlike traditional recordkeeping, there is no central database for meddlers to corrupt.

Blockchain technology supports the sale and use of digital currencies (like bitcoin) and just as importantly, “smart contracts” that enforce the rules about how value is exchanged by parties when they reach agreement. Ethereum utilizes its blockchain platform to host most of the projects that attract, manage and pay for time and talent in decentralized ways today. Tantalizing glimpses into this future are also available at the social network Steemit and on the payment platform Bitwage.

Steemit’s uses a digital currency called Steem that you can redeem for cash for your contributions to the social network’s “hivemind.” For example, users are paid for posts, for the number of people liking their posts, for how quickly you spot another post that becomes popular, that is, for the value of your contributions to the network. Users are funding jobs like travel blogging while they crisscross the world and, reportedly, one early adopter has already earned more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In more traditional buying-and-selling transactions, Bitwage’s payment application allows employees or freelancers to receive their wages in bitcoin without requiring either their employers or clients to use a digital currency exchange.

For work-based ecosystems built on blockchains to evolve further, they will need to become faster and more scalable without sacrificing the security and decentralization that are their hallmarks. In this pursuit, Ethereum and a raft of competitors are experimenting with a protocol called Lightening that can settle millions of digital currency transactions more quickly and cheaply but that needs “to go off the blockchain” in order to do so. These companies are also exploring structural changes to basic blockchain technology. The prize that drives them is an online platform that is durable enough to support a global marketplace where every kind of work can be bought and sold.

Let’s call it a work2benefit exchange.

Because your time and talent has value and is in limited supply, you could sell it in a market that’s vibrant enough to buy it. A blockchain-based exchange might easily handle transactions that involve very small as well as larger, project-oriented jobs. Because you have capabilities that you’ve sold before and others that you’ve given away because there was no way to be compensated, an exchange like this could help secure prior income streams while providing you with new ones. Such a marketplace would easily dwarf Walmart’s in size without the downsides of a company middleman taking his profits, making you keep his work schedule, commute to his place of business or contribute to his overhead.

Previously unrealized income streams—even small ones—will be particularly welcome.

Suppose you’re asked to provide 5 minutes of feedback on your recent doctor’s visit. Your scarce resources are the time and judgment that you might not provide if you weren’t being paid for them. Their one-time value might be modest, but as the demands for your input keep coming, payments for it will add up. A blockchain exchange could pay you for editing a resume in 20 minutes or designing a company’s logo in 2 hours; providing traffic-cam information on heavily traveled routes you are already taking; matchmaking acquaintances with service providers that have something they need; selling your personal data to marketers who want you to buy their products; maybe even a government incentive for completing your tax returns or voting in the next election. Similarly, when I need the benefit of someone else’s work, this marketplace could connect me to it, even if the time and talent is half a world away.

Work2benefit exchanges that can handle incremental transactions like these haven’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough buyers and sellers to make them viable—but they’re coming. You’ll still need your judgment, vision and hustle, but before long it will be possible to make a living in a marketplace where you (and maybe billions of others) will each be blocks in a global blockchain. Many people will continue to work in groups. Offices and factories won’t vanish. But traditional jobs that once came with pensions, health benefits and provable credit will become increasingly scarce. The stripped-down, “independent contractor” work that’s left will almost certainly be supplemented by new ways of getting paid for your human resources.

Blockchain and related technologies will unlock new categories of personal wealth and autonomy. They could fill the future of work with greater abundance for us to share with one another. Tomorrow’s challenge won’t be finding enough work to make a living but reimagining and re-bundling job securities like health care and creditworthiness around all the new jobs we’ll be doing. Next week, I’ll introduce you to some of the people and companies that are helping to build these protections around our increasingly autonomous workforce.

2. The Future Begins With a Vision

A vision should linger and inspire for long enough that it fixes in the minds eye where it becomes part of the imagination, a cause for hope, and fuel that’s needed to overcome the obstacles that will always stand in its way. Here, in brief, are some of the challenges that a bold-enough vision will need to see us through, starting with the inevitable turf wars and technology challenges:

-There is resistance from the mainstream banking community to digital currencies and the exchanges that convert them into cash for gig economy paychecks. For example, a story in today’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the banking controversy that has already embroiled one digital currency exchange. Some of the current banking industry will need to be disrupted so that new “fin-tech” mechanisms can take their place.

-There are technology challenges to making digital platforms large enough to handle the smart contracts that will bring all these new buyers and sellers of work together. The ecosystem of applications will need to be robust enough to attract, manage and compensate the sale of goods and talent in a global marketplace. To meet these challenges, new applications are being developed outside of blockchain’s architecture (with its attendant security risks and middleman costs) while some of the fundamentals behind blockchain technology itself are being reconsidered. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, more about blockchain’s “scalability” hurdles can be found here.

-Managing yourself to a stable, reliable income from many jobs in a way that meets your needs and your family’s needs requires its own expertise. The freedom to decide when to work and how often to work is liberating, but as the recent strikes by Uber drivers illustrate, it isn’t easy to cobble a patchwork of compensated time “into a living” while also selling your services at “a market price.” We’ll all have to learn more about how to put our livelihoods together while finding new ways to bargain effectively for what we need from each one of our work-based exchanges.

-Not everyone is naturally suited to be an entrepreneur, so we’ll have to learn how to embrace additional parts of our entrepreneurial spirit too. Working for yourself involves not only doing your paying jobs but also functioning as your back and front offices by doing your own marketing, accounting, taxes, establishing and monitoring your co-working relationships, maintaining your skill levels, and determining the prices for your goods and services. Most 9-5 jobs didn’t require you to do all these things, but as jobs like this disappear, you’ll be doing more of them yourself—with both the upsides and downsides that new opportunities for growth and mastery can bring.

Thinking through the hurdles hopefully reminds us of the promises. We’ll thrive with greater freedom, convenience and efficiency by working where, when and how we want to. We’ll be paid for increments of our time that we used to give away for free. We’ll increasingly stand both behind our work and out in front of it in ways that will make “what we do” an even more powerful demonstration of who we are and what is important to us.

This future of work is being written today.

We’re building it with our ideas and conversations as new ecosystems gradually evolve around it.

What comes next will be exciting and daunting, both creative and destructive, as the familiar is replaced by something that few of us have experienced before.

This future can have a human face, an opportunity for workers, families and communities to flourish, as long as we don’t leave the ideas and conversations about how that can happen to someone else.

This post was adapted from my May 19, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken

April 23, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

A growing part of the American economy—the part that’s harvesting and utilizing our personal data to drive what we consume—no longer depends on “the basic reciprocities” that once supported our social contract. In other segments of our economy, business is also profiting at worker’s expense and democratic capitalism’s promises to us about shared prosperity are regularly broken.

The mutual benefits of a capitalist economy were supposed to include our thriving as workers, being fairly compensated for our work and able to support our families and communities, while our employers also thrived when we used our paychecks to buy their goods and services. That virtuous circle has been the bedrock of capitalism’s social contract since Adam Smith first described it 300 years ago.

Today, its bonds are weakened, if not altogether broken.

A leading edge of the breakdown is tech platforms harvesting our personal data “for free” while selling it to others who use it to drive our decisions about what we consume. In what’s been called “surveillance capitalism,” we’re no longer valued at the front end of the exchange for what we provide (in this instance, our information). Instead our only value is at the back-end, determined by how much the companies that utilize our data can manipulate us into buying whatever they’re selling.

In this growing segment of our economy, largely exploitative exchanges have already replaced mutually beneficial ones. In addition to not paying us for our information, this economic model creates very few jobs in a departure from the consumer-oriented companies of the past. Its failure to value what we’re providing as workers and consumers relative to the enormous profits its trophy companies are reaping undermines both the health of the economy and the democratic institutions that depend on it.

In our economy’s more traditional jobs, we are also losing out today when it comes to the fair exchange of our work for its supposed benefits. A broader stagnation in the American economy results when the benefits that companies gain from pro-business policies fail to “trickle down” and benefit the vast majority of workers who lack the financial security to also be shareholders in these same companies. The result is a yawning wealth gap between the 1% (or, perhaps more accurately, the top 10%) and every other American.

Communities break down both economically and politically when we’re not compensated adequately for the work and information that we provide. What were supposed to be “a series of mutual benefit equations” between workers and employers, consumers and companies that sell us things, have become increasingly unbalanced.

The first discussion today looks at this breakdown in the social contract. The second part argues for a shift in priorities that can confront the perils of surveillance capitalism along with other distortions—like income inequality and stagnant growth—that harm all but a small percentage of those who participate in America’s economy today.

Instead of more failed attempts to increase economic opportunity through pro-business polices or to limit the harms of this approach with band aids for those it leaves behind, a far better alternative is promoting work for all who are willing to do it, while making the dignity of work (and the thriving families and communities that good work produces) our priorities. Rebalancing the economic equation for workers and consumers will enable the economy to benefit nearly everyone again while mending vital parts of America’s promise.

I took the pictures here in Germantown, a nearby “town” in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War battle took place. Three centuries ago, America’s democratic capitalism began in places like Germantown. In the fabric of its old and repurposed buildings, it’s not difficult to find a metaphor when you’re looking for one.

In the side of one old factory, there is a bricked-in wall where there used to be a workroom. In the future of our work, I’d argue that bricked-over workrooms like this, where we used to benefit from our contributions as workers and consumers, need to be opened up and revitalized. We need to call out our increasingly feudal system for what it is, and reorient our priorities to restore basic economic relationships that are foundation stones for our way of life.

The Fundamental Breakdown

In a post from January, I discussed the arguments that Oren Cass makes in his new book The Once and Future Worker about how the mutually beneficial relationships between workers, consumers and businesses have broken down since the 1970s and our repeated failures to address the imbalance. As I said at the time:

[Cass] is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving [business profits] over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view.

Cass argues that propping up business to create a bigger pie for all has been a failure because those bigger slices are being eaten almost exclusively by business owners and their investors as opposed to their workers, their communities, or the economy at large. To counter this result, Cass wants policy makers to adopt entirely different priorities than the Right and Left have been embracing, namely, active, sustained promotion of “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities [as] the central determinant of long term prosperity.” Several of his proposals about how to do so, along with his views about the dignity of work and its importance to democracy, are set out in that earlier post.

Cass’s conclusion (and mine) is that America needs to change its economic priorities before the costs of failure get any worse.

In another new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff focuses on a leading edge of the current problem: the stark imbalance in “behavioral futures markets” where data about what we “are likely to want next” has tremendous value to companies selling us products and services but which no one has been paying us to provide. For Zuboff, these tech platforms, along with the marketers and sellers who buy our behavioral information, have created “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material” while implementing “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification.” If the industry players can seduce you into giving enough information about your motivations and desires to your smart phones, smart speakers, social networks and search engines, they can persuade you to buy (or do) almost anything.

Zuboff discusses how economic theorists from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek legitimized capitalism as a system where workers needed to be paid well enough to provide for their families, be productive members of their communities, and have enough spending money left over to buy the products and services that companies like their employers were providing. In an essay that laid out her argument before Surveillance Capitalism was published, Zuboff cites economic historian Karl Polanyi for his views about how American companies after World War II were expected to offer a kind of communal reciprocity that involved hiring the available workers, hiking wages when possible, and sharing their prosperity rather than hoarding it.

Polanyi knew that capitalism was never self-regulating, could be profoundly destructive, and that its foreseeable human tolls needed to be minimized. To do so, “measures and policies” also had to be integrated “into powerful institutions [that were] designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land and money.” Zuboff cites Polanyi’s post-War study of General Motors not only for for the ways that fair labor practices, unionization and collective bargaining preserved “the organic reciprocities” between its workers and owners but also for how much the public appreciated these shared benefits at the time.

In the 1950s, for example, 80 percent of [American] adults said that ‘big business’ was a good thing for the country, 66 percent believed that business required little or no change, and 60 percent agreed, ‘the profits of large companies help make things better for everyone who buys their products or services.’

It was a balance that persisted for almost 40 years until what Zuboff calls “the ascendancy of neoliberalism” promoted an extreme form of capitalism where owner profits and share price were paramount and a responsible commitment to workers and communities no longer held capitalism’s worst tendencies in check. Around 1980, Oren Cass notes a related shift. Instead of creating worker satisfaction through “the dignity of work,” there was an economic policy shift from promoting worker satisfaction through the quality of their jobs to keeping them happy as consumers by giving them more stuff to buy with their paychecks.

Zuboff argues that the surveillance capitalists stepped in once these established reciprocities were breached, with profound effects for individual Americans as workers and consumers, for communities whose vitality depends on them, and for our democratic way of life itself.

Instead of paying for the parts of us that they’re profiting from, the surveillance capitalists pay us nothing for our behavioral data. Given the enormous size and profitability of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, they also “give back” far fewer jobs to the employment market than a GM once did. Moreover, these companies feel that they owe us nothing in exchange for manipulating us into buying whatever they’re selling—what Zuboff calls a kind of “radical indifference.” Without so much as an afterthought, they take without giving much back to us individually, to the job market, or to the community at large. Capitalism’s ability to lift all boats was supposed to be a driving force for democracy and the genius of the American Dream.

The absence of organic reciprocities with people as sources of either consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both Britain and America have been traced to these very reciprocities. [the citations I’ve omitted here are provided in her essay]

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff describes the problem but doesn’t propose solutions. Cass, on the other hand, argues that capitalism remains the best hope for workers to reclaim their share of economic prosperity, but that we’ll have to change our public policies in order to restore the necessary reciprocities. As for surveillance capitalism, tech futurist Jaron Lanier made an early argument for countering tech company indifference and reclaiming the benefit of our personal data in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? His proposals are even more feasible today.

The bricked-off memory of this old workroom seems more hopeful in the springtime.

Restoring the Balance

Cass’s Once and Future Worker is an important book because he backs up his ideological preferences with hard data. His solutions begin with the need for new government policies that aim to support thriving workers, families and communities by reinforcing the democratic give-and-take that is barely holding America together today. Along the way, Cass never loses sight of the real human impacts—for better and for worse—of economic forces and the policies that attempt to manage them.

For example, in his chapter “A Future for Work,” Cass argues that the workforce disruptions that will result from automation are a natural and positive effect of every innovation from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Learning how to do more with less is essential for economic growth. At the same time however, he argues strenuously that gains in economic productivity from new inventions and technologies (fewer workers producing the same amount) need to be matched by policy-driven gains in overall economic output (which will give displaced workers the ability to find new jobs as more wealth is created, living standards improve and consumer demand grows).

This is precisely what happened from 1947 to 1972, widely seen as the golden age of American manufacturing and the nation’s middle class. Economy-wide productivity increased by 99 percent; only fifty workers were needed by the end of the Vietnam War to do the work that one hundred could complete at the end of World War II. The result was not mass unemployment. Instead, America produced more stuff. The same share of the population was working in 1972 as in 1947, and men’s median income was 86 percent higher…[W]ith fewer workers required to produce the output of 1947, many could serve markets in 1972 that hadn’t existed a generation earlier or that had been much smaller.

Cass admits that these disruptions are hard for individual workers to weather but that expanding economic output always provides new jobs for displaced workers eventually. I’ve discussed the theory that at least some workers can prepare for disruptions like automation by developing skills “at the scalable edges” of their industries before their jobs disappear. But Cass also cites the introduction of ATM machines and fears about bank closures for an easier transition given the health of the economy at the time. In the years when ATM machines debuted, economic output (or an expanding economy) was matching productivity gains (and business profits). Since these ATMs lowered the banks’ cost of doing business, they repeatedly responded by opening more branches and creating new jobs.

Unfortunately, government statistics indicate that current productivity gains are not being matched by gains in overall economic output. It is a time when companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are using their innovations to maximize corporate profits but provide relatively few jobs while exploiting free user data–giving back little (beyond convenience) that can enable workers, families and communities to thrive as well. So if you don’t feel like you’re “getting ahead” today, it’s not your imagination; the output economy that creates new economic opportunities and new jobs isn’t keeping up, and it hasn’t been doing so for years. Writes Cass:

From 1950 to 2000, while productivity in the manufacturing sector rose by 3.1 percent annually, value-added output grew by 3.6 percent—and employment increased, from 14 million to 17 million. During 2000-2016, productivity rose by a similar 3.3 percent annually. But output growth was only 1.1 percent—and employment fell, from 17 million to 12 million. Even with all of the technological advancement of the twenty-first century, had manufacturers continued to grow their businesses at the same rate as in the prior century, they would have needed more workers—a total of 18 million, by 2016 [if output had also been growing].

While he does not describe the problem in terms of “reciprocities” between workers, businesses and consumers like Zuboff, Cass would agree that the imbalances between them are at the heart of the problem and need to be corrected. Once again, several of the policy solutions he proposes are reviewed in my January post. All reject the failed economic policies of the Left and the Right in favor of new approaches that will help workers, families and communities to thrive even if we have to settle for making somewhat less money as an economy overall.

Long before Shoshana Zuboff was railing about “surveillance capitalism,” Jaron Lanier was arguing that our behavioral information has tremendous value to the tech platforms, marketers and sellers or what he calls the “Siren Servers” that are harvesting it, and that we should be putting a price tag on our personal data before they take any more of it for free.

Like both Zuboff and Cass, Lanier believes in an economy that is sustained by a thriving middle class with plenty of hard, fulfilling work. His quandary is finding a way that more livelihoods can be sustained “in a world in which information is king,” as his Guardian book reviewer put it.

To that end, Lanier fears that in the early days of the internet we spent too much time worrying about open access and too little, if any time worrying about the digital economy’s likely impacts on job security and the monetizing of user information. Lanier emphasizes the highly personal nature of this exploitation by arguing that our behavioral data “is people in disguise” and morally intertwined with the humans who supplied it.

Lanier’s corrective is to implement a system where we would each be given “nanopayments” for the use of our biometric property. In 2013, he envisioned more sophisticated archives to record where our data originates as well as what it should be worth. He takes over half of his book to describe this mechanism. For our purposes, what he envisioned five years ago can be reduced (although far too easily) to a series of blockchain-based payments for our provision of useful personal data, similar to the system discussed here in a post from last August. Lanier’s nanopayments to individuals whenever a company profits from their personal information would be daunting to implement but it would also go a long way towards restoring Zuboff’s “organic reciprocities” and bringing Cass’s broader economic growth into the business of surveillance capitalism.

+ + +

The mutual benefits that we once enjoyed as workers, consumers and business owners in exchange for what we were providing is no longer a reality. The reasons for that loss and the blame for those responsible are just the front-end of our thinking about what we’re prepared to do about it.

In the election cycles ahead of us, it is hard to believe that our nation will have the kind of reasoned debate that we need to be having about the future of our work and its impact on our families, our local communities and our way of life itself. But maybe, hopefully, a conversation along the lines I am arguing for above will begin alongside the shouting matches we are already having about the need to abandon democratic capitalism altogether.

Cass, Zuboff and Lanier all begin with the proposition—and it’s where I start too—that our future needs to be built by human workers and that the work we’ll be doing needs to enable us, our loved ones, our neighbors, our shared economy, and not merely a protected few, to flourish.

We have managed to do this before.

Many of us have experienced its mutual benefit in our lifetimes, and we can experience it again.

But first, we’ll need to restore the social contract around our work.

This post was adapted from my April 21, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe on this page, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

March 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It is human priorities that should be driving Smart City initiatives, like the ones in Toronto profiled here last week.

Last week’s post also focused on a pioneering spirit in Toronto that many American cities and towns seem to have lost. While we entrench in the moral righteousness of our sides in the debate—including, for many, a distrust of collective governance, regulation and taxation—we drift towards an uncertain future instead of claiming one that can be built on values we actually share.

In its King Street and Quayside initiatives, Toronto is actively experimenting with the future it wants based on its residents’ commitment to sustaining their natural environment in the face of urban life’s often toxic impacts. They’re conducting these experiments in a relatively civil, collaborative and productive way—an urban role model for places that seem to have forgotten how to work together. Toronto’s bold experiments are also utilizing “smart” technologies in their on-going attempts to “optimize” living and working in new, experimental communities.

During a short trip this week, I got to see the leading edges of New York City’s new Hudson Yards community (spread over 28 acres with an estimated $25 billion price tag) and couldn’t help being struck by how much it catered to those seeking more luxury living, shopping and workspaces than Manhattan already affords. In other words, how much it could have been a bold experiment about new ways that all of its citizens might live and work in America’s first city for the next half-century, but how little it actually was. A hundred years ago, one of the largest immigrant migrations in history made New York City the envy of the world. With half of its current citizens being foreign-born, perhaps the next century, unfurling today, belongs to newer cities like Toronto.

Still, even with its laudable ambition, it will not be easy for Toronto and other future-facing communities to get their Smart City initiatives right, as several of you were also quick to remind me last week. Here is a complaint from a King Street merchant that one of you (thanks Josh!) found and forwarded that seems to cast what is happening in Toronto in a less favorable light than I had focused upon it:

What a wonderful story. But as with [all of] these wonderful plans some seem to be forgotten. As it appears are the actual merchants. Google certainly a big winner here. Below an excerpt written by one of the merchants:

‘The City of Toronto has chosen the worst time, in the worst way, in the worst season to implement the pilot project. Their goal is clearly to move people through King St., not to King St. For years King St. was a destination, now it is a thoroughfare.

‘The goal of the King St. Pilot project was said to be to balance three important principles: to move people more effectively on transit, to support business and economic prosperity and to improve public space. In its current form, the competing principles seem to be decidedly tilted away from the economic well-being of merchants and biases efficiency over convenience. The casual stickiness of pedestrians walking and stopping at stores, restaurants and other merchants is lost.

‘Additionally, the [transit authority] TTC has eliminated a number of stops along King St., forcing passengers to walk further to enter and disembark streetcars, further reducing pedestrian traffic and affecting areas businesses. The TTC appears to believe that if they didn’t have to pick up and drop off people, they could run their system more effectively.

‘The dubious benefits of faster street car traffic on King St. notwithstanding, the collateral damage of the increased traffic of the more than 20,000 cars the TTC alleges are displaced from King St to adjoining streets has turned Adelaide, Queen, Wellington and Front Sts. into a gridlock standstill. Anyone who has tried to navigate the area can attest that much of the time, no matter how close you are you can’t get there from here.

‘Along with the other merchants of King St. and the Toronto Entertainment District we ask that Mayor Tory and Toronto council to consider a simple, reasonable and cost-effective alternative. Put lights on King St. that restrict vehicle traffic during rush hours, but return King St. to its former vibrant self after 7 p.m., on weekends and statutory holidays. It’s smart, fair, reasonable and helps meet the goals of the King St. pilot project.

Two things about this complaint seemed noteworthy. The first is how civil and constructive this criticism is in a process that hopes to “iterate” as real time impacts are assessed. It’s a tribute that Toronto’s experiments not only invite but are also receiving feedback like this. Alas, the second take-away from Josh’s comment is far more nettlesome. “[However many losers there may be along the way:] Google certainly a big winner here.”

The tech giant’s partnership with Canada’s governments in Toronto raises a constellation of challenging issues, but it’s useful to recall that pioneers who dare to claim new frontiers always do so with the best technology that’s available. While the settling of the American West involved significant collateral damage (to Native Americans and Chinese migrants, to the buffalo and the land itself), it would not have been possible without existing innovations and new ones that these pioneers fashioned along the way. Think of the railroads, the telegraph poles, even something as low-tech as the barbed wire that was used to contain livestock.

The problem isn’t human and corporate greed or heartless technology—we know about them already—but failing to recognize and reduce their harmful impacts before it is too late. The objective for pioneers on new frontiers should always be maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms that can be foreseen from the very beginning instead of looking back with anger after the damage is done.

We have that opportunity with Smart City initiatives today.

Because they concentrate many of the choices that will have to be made when we boldly dare to claim the future of America again, I’ve been looking for a roadmap through the moral thicket in the books and articles that are being written about these initiatives today. Here are some of the markers that I’ve discovered.

Human priorities, realized with the help of technology

1. Markers on the Road to Smarter and More Vibrant Communities

The following insights come almost entirely from a short article by Robert Kitchin, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland. In my review of the on-going conversation about Smart Cities, I found him to be one of its most helpful observers.

In his article, Kitchin discusses the three principal ways that smart cities are understood, the key promises smart initiatives make to stakeholders, and the perils to be avoided around these promises.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people envision cities and other communities “getting smarter” in different ways. One constituency sees an opportunity to improve both “urban regulation and governance through instrumentation and data-driven systems”–essentially, a management tool. A bolder and more transformative vision sees information and communication technology “re-configur[ing] human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, and management,” thereby “produc[ing] smarter citizens, workers and public servants” who “can enact polic[ies], produce better products… foster indigenous entrepreneurship and attract inward investment.” The first makes the frontier operate more efficiently while the second improves nearly every corner of it.

The third Smart City vision is “a counter-weight or alternative” to each of them. It wants these technologies “to promote a citizen-centric model of development that fosters social innovation and social justice, civic engagement and hactivism, and transparent and accountable governance.” In this model, technology serves social objectives like greater equality and fairness. Kitchin reminds us that these three visions are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the priorities embedded in a community’s vision of a “smarter” future could include elements of each of them, functioning like checks and balances, in tension with one another.

Smart City initiatives promise to solve pressing urban problems, including poor economic performance; government dysfunction; constrained mobility; environmental degradation; a declining quality of life, including risks to safety and security; and a disengaged, unproductive citizen base. Writes Kitchin:

the smart city promises to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities – how to reduce costs and create economic growth and resilience at the same time as producing sustainability and improving services, participation and quality of life – and to do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways.

Once again, it’s a delicate balancing act with a range of countervailing interests and constituencies, as you can see in the chart from a related discussion above.

The perils of Smart Cities should never overwhelm their promise in my view, but urban pioneers should always have them in mind (from planning through implementation) because some perils only manifest themselves over time. According to Kitchin, the seven dangers in pursuing these initiatives include:

–taking “a ‘one size fits all’ approach, treating cities as generic markets and solutions [that are] straightforwardly scalable and movable”;

–assuming that initiatives are “objective and non-ideological, grounded in either science or commonsense.” You can aim for these ideals, but human and organizational preferences and biases will always be embedded within them.

–believing that the complex social problems in communities can be reduced to “neatly defined technical problems” that smart technology can also solve. The ways that citizens have always framed and resolved their community problems cannot be automated so easily. (This is also the thrust of Ben Green’s Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, which will be published by MIT Press in April. In it he argues for “smart enough alternatives” that are attainable with the help of technology but never reducible to technology solutions alone.)

–engaging with corporations that are using smart city technologies “to capture government functions as new market opportunities.” One risk of a company like Google to communities like Toronto’s is that Google might lock Toronto in to its proprietary technologies and vendors over a long period of time or use Toronto’s citizen data to gain business opportunities in other cities.

–becoming straddled with “buggy, brittle and hackable” systems that are ever more “complicated, interconnected and dependent on software” while becoming more resistant to manual fixes.

–becoming victimized by “pervasive dataveillance that erodes privacy” through practices like “algorithmic social sorting (whether people get a loan, a tenancy, a job, etc), dynamic pricing (whereby different people pay varying prices depending on their perceived customer value) and anticipatory governance using predictive profiling (wherein data precedes how a person is policed and governed).” Earlier this month, my post on popular on-line games like Fortnite highlighted the additional risk that invasive technologies can use the data they are gathering to change peoples’ behavior.

-and lastly, reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of eroding or reconfiguring them.

While acknowledging the promise of Smart Cities at their best, Kitchin closes his article with this cautionary note:

the realities of implementation are messier and more complex than the marketing hype of corporations or city managers portray and there are a number of social, political, ethical and legal concerns with respect to the kind of society smart city initiatives seek to create. As such, whilst networked urbanism has benefits, it also poses challenges and risks that are often little explored or legislated for ahead of implementation. Indeed, the pace of development and rollout of smart city technologies is proceeding well ahead of wider reflection, critique and regulation.

Putting the cart before a suitably-designed horse is a problem with all new and seductive technologies that get embraced before their harms are identified or can be addressed—a quandary that was also considered here in a post called “Looking Out for the Human Side of Technology.”

2. The Value of Our Data

A few additional considerations about the Smart City are also worth bearing in mind as debate about these initiatives intensifies.

In a March 8, 2019 post, Kurtis McBride wrote about two different ways “to value” the data that these initiatives will produce, and his distinction is an important one. It’s a discussion that citizens, government officials and tech companies should be having, but unfortunately are not having as much as they need to.

When Smart City data is free to everyone, there is the risk that the multinationals generating it will merely use it to increase their power and profits in the growing market for Smart City technologies and services. From the residents’ perspective, McBride argues that it’s “reasonable for citizens to expect to see benefit” from their data, while noting that these same citizens will also be paying dearly for smart upgrades to their communities. His proposal on valuing citizen data depends on how it will be used by tech companies like Google or local service providers. For example, if citizen data is used:

to map the safest and fastest routes for cyclists across the city and offers that information free to all citizens, [the tech company] is providing citizen benefit and should be able to access the needed smart city data free of charge.

But, if a courier company uses real-time traffic data to optimize their routes, improving their productivity and profit margins – there is no broad citizen benefit. In those cases, I think it’s fair to ask those organizations to pay to access the needed city data, providing a revenue stream cities can then use to improve city services for all.

Applying McBride’s reasoning, an impartial body in a city like Toronto would need to decide whether Google has to pay for data generated in its Quayside community by consulting a benefit-to-citizens standard. Clearly, if Google wanted to use Quayside data in a Smart City initiative in say Colorado or California, it would need to pay Toronto for the use of its citizens’ information.

Of course, addressing the imbalance between those (like us) who provide the data and the tech companies that use it to increase their profits and influence is not just a problem for Smart City initiatives, and changing the “value proposition” around our data is surely part of the solution. In her new book Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff says that “you’re the product if these companies aren’t paying you for your data” does not state the case powerfully enough. She argues that the big tech platforms are like elephant poachers and our personal data like those elephants’ ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she writes. “You are the abandoned carcass.”

Smart City initiatives also provide a way to think about “the value of our data” in the context of our living and working and not merely as the gateway to more convenient shopping, more addictive gaming experiences or “free” search engines like Googles’.

This post is adapted from my March 24, 2019 newsletter. Subscribe today and receive an email copy of future posts in your inbox each week.

A Winter of Work Needs More Color

January 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past week, it’s been cold here, then warm, and now cold again. But one of the constants has been how this season seems to drain the world of its color.

It strikes me as a fitting metaphor for what has been happening to the nature and quality of our work in this economy. Choices have been made, and continue to be made, by policymakers on the left as well as right that are draining the color out of work for many, if not most Americans. To restore some of work’s dignity—its life force if you will—we need to make some different choices in the future than we are making today.

In recent newsletters, I’ve been considering how we landed in this increasingly barren place and what we might do to get out of it. Today, we’ll mull over the bold solutions that Oren Cass offers in his new book The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America. Cass argues that for the sake of our families, communities and individual wellbeing, we need to make some difficult choices about what is good for us as a country and what is not. Before turning to his arguments, here’s a quick review of the discussion we’ve been having recently about the declining prospects for the future of our work.

An immediate challenge is the impending loss of our jobs to machines that can work more efficiently than we can. In an economy that champions “making the most of everything as cheaply as possible,” many of us will simply become too expensive and, at the same time, unable to retrain fast enough for the few jobs that will be left for us to do. My post a couple weeks back considered where opportunities might remain at the “scaling edges” of business today, how an aging workforce can maintain its value during this period of rapid transition, and perhaps most importantly, how government policies that support workers need to be implemented if we want America to continue to capitalize on its human resources.

Around Thanksgiving, I wrote another post about “the mass flourishing” that America enjoyed through much of the 19^thCentury and deep into the 20^th. During the century and a half when the economy flourished, the workforce generally flourished as well. American leaders celebrated the human values of thinking for yourself, working for yourself, competing with others, overcoming obstacles, experimenting and making your mark. On the other hand, for the past 50 years as policy makers have tried to mitigate every kind of modern risk with regulations and safety nets, the psychic rewards that once came from “the rough and tumble working world” were gradually replaced by a different economic promise, one of ever greater material well-being. Edmund Phelps and others argue that this trade-off has undermined “the mass flourishing” we used to enjoy. Instead of worker satisfaction coming from working, the economy is being driven to produce more and more stuff for the workforce to consume when they’re not in order to keep them happy. Unfortunately, the promise of ever cheaper and bigger television sets and faster gadgets cannot meet the “non-material” needs that used to be satisfied for many by working.

Both of these posts assume that work has inherent value—that it is not merely the means that gets you more money, stuff, influence or time off. By giving us an opportuniy to demonstrate our capabilities, work allows us to realize our potential, be proud of our abilities to provide for ourselves and our families, be similarly proud of what we’re making or doing, and be more confident when facing the future because we feel that we have a stake in it and that it is not merely “happening to us.” When enough individual workers flourish like this, Phelps argues, an economy overall flourishes.

Cass’s argument in The Once and Future Worker assumes this too, before he documents how working families and communities are currently in jeopardy across America. What follows are highlights from his book, from a half-hour talk he recently gave to a group of policy wonks, and from some of the reactions to his value judgments and original proposals.

For Cass, the crisis for the American worker is evident from several unassailable facts: that wages have stagnated for a more than a generation while reliance on entitlement programs has grown and life expectancy has fallen due to addiction and obesity. He is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving economic growth over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view. He argues that if:

a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities is the central determinant of long term prosperity, so it should be the central focus of our public policy.

When it comes to work, Cass is convinced that working—and the social benefit it provides—is more satisfying to individuals than being able to consume bigger and cheaper stuff. He is particularly concerned about the human toll, reliying on studies that say workers never recover economically from unemployment; that men only form families when they have work that can provide for them; that unemployment is a trigger for divorce; and that children have better outcomes when at least one parent is working. Moreover, communities where people are working are more vibrant and tend to attract more investment. In other words, communities filled with workers are good for those living there and good for everyone else too.

In addition, Cass cites time-use data indicating that men who are not in the workforce are watching TV or sleeping, not engaged in other productive activities. Making products or providing services that other people want is also satisfying to many who are doing so every day. Where people aren’t working, they (in Cass’s phase) “export their needs” instead, resulting in a massive transfer of payments from taxpayers to meet those needs–the Left’s band-aids. On the Right, a relentless drive to grow the economy with pro-business policies so we have more to consume at the lowest possible price not only overrides other priorities, but also makes the false assumption that short term material gratification will provide long-term economic health and stability. Whatever is satisfying consumer whims in the moment is not necessarily good for any economy long term.

So what can be done about this?

A slice of winter color by the cold Schuylkill River

With the co-dependent (but effectively dead-end) positions of the Left and the Right providing no sustainable way forward, Cass has several ideas.

In addition to questioning many of our investments in growth or safety nets, Cass challenges other allocations that America is making with its wealth, some that I agree with and others less so.

Challenging both sides’ longstanding preference for the elites, Cass would sharply reduce government subsidies for college degrees, noting that most Americans don’t even attend a community college today. These subsidies supposedly produce economic growth because the best students become the most innovative workers. But he argues that a better and fairer result would be less “college prep” and more “vocational training” for the vast majority of students who will never be going to work for a tech company in an innovation hub.

In terms of trade policy, Cass wonders why America has (at least until recently) promoted unfettered access to the cheapest labor in the world instead of creating new jobs here that are equivalent to the ones that were lost through globalization.

He argues for a reduction in environmental investments because (again) they are focused on consumer welfare instead of other considerations. To Cass, the cost of, say, clean air or water is not merely the cost of the equipment that’s needed to produce it but also “the costs” of all the other things that we could be doing for our citizens if we weren’t so preoccupied with environmental safeguards. In his cost-benefit analysis, he’d weigh the costs of subsidies for alternative energy and complying with more EPA regulations with the benefits of more jobs or higher wages. I think weighing, balancing and considering different investment strategies is always a useful exercise, but would question whether environmental investments are “short-term” consumer welfare benefits instead of longer-term, life-sustaining ones.

While admitting that labor unions in America have been overtaken by the politics of the Left, Cass argues that stripped of this influence, we should all be excited by workers who are organizing. He references several initiatives here and in Europe that are challenging pro-growth policies on the Right and championing pro-worker issues that have very few advocates on either side of the political divide.

Cass’s most warmly received proposal has been to take some of the funding for programs that currently support non-workers and give it to low-wage workers in the form of a salary boost, providing them with a supplemented income that can better sustain them and their families. (Think of the vulnerability of many federal employees after recently losing a single paycheck.) Cass notes that we let the government take money from our paychecks (like taxes), why not put additional dollars into them for struggling workers on a regular basis? In addition to encouraging work instead of idleness, such a policy change would be revenue-neutral by moving monies from programs that support non-workers into a new one that bolsters the most vulnerable end of the workforce.

Cass’s bottom line is that investments that help all working families and communities to thrive will sustain our long-term prosperity more effectively than most government investments today. As taxpayers who finance and citizens who vote for the future that we want, he invites us to throw many of our current social expenditures on the table and consider whether they are more (or less) important to the future than enabling all of America’s families and communities to thrive—particularly when much of the country is already missing out on America’s prosperity today. Given the fools bargain we have all accepted, Cass wants us to “try on” his work-based ethic and help to decide whether our country should be embracing very different priorities than it has for the past five decades.

Two prior posts, on June 3 and 10 last summer, argued that whenever a dissenter from the prevailing wisdoms like Cass takes a principled stand, he is inviting those who are unclear about their priorities to clarify them and those who disagree with them to speak up. Principle-based dissent and the conversation that follows almost always makes our “next steps” as stakeholders more assured. To facilitate that forward movement by putting Cass’s ideas into a broader context, here is one helpful reaction to his priority-of-work arguments that also manages to echo what several others have been saying.

Winter color for families and the rest of the community at a playground in Bella Vista

After Cass’s book came out, Ross Douthat wrote a column in the New York Times about the struggle amongst the members of “a small church” of moderates “to claim a middle ground between left-wing pessimism about the post-1970s American economy and right-wing faith in the eternal verities of Reaganomics.” Given the similarity between how they and Cass saw the problem, Douthat summarized some of the issues that he and other moderates have with Cass’s proposed solutions.

[A] common thread is that Cass’s diagnosis overstates the struggles of American workers and exaggerates the downsides of globalization, and in so doing risks giving aid and comfort to populist policies [like Trump’s] — or, for that matter, socialist policies, from the Ocasio-Cortezan left — that would ultimately choke off growth.

Not unlike Edmund Phelps, who would also favors largely unencumbered profit seekers, Douthat initially puts more faith in the continued vibrancy of a growth economy than in the need to make as many new investments in our families and communities as Cass advocates.

On the other hand, Douthat allows that America may have made as much progress as it can along its current path, and that the dead-end many (including me) are feeling may already be here.

[I]s the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?

He concludes with what I’d call a fork in the road. If you tend towards the pessimistic view from the perspective of America’s working families and communities then pursuing some of Cass’s proposals may be the only way to preserve at least some of the American economy’s growth prospects going forward.

Perhaps the best reason to bet on Cass’s specific vision is that the social crisis he wants to address is itself a major long-term drag on growth — because a society whose working class doesn’t work or marry or bear children will age, even faster than the West is presently aging, into stagnation and decline.

At the same time, Douthat also notes (with some of Cass’s other critics) that working America’s challenges may be “cultural” instead of economic. I imagine that he’s thinking of factors like declining commitments to organized religion, marriage, community life and even participation in democracy itself, along with greater self-absorption with our devices and crises like opioid addiction. Encouraging work and redirecting the fruits of growth for the sake of thriving families and communities won’t help if what ails working America can’t be cured by larger investments.

I don’t happen to agree with this last possibility—but there it is.

+ + +

One of the reasons that I write this newsletter is because much of the discussion about work and work-related policy, to the extent that it occurs at all, happens below the radar. I’m convinced it’s a discussion that needs to be heard (and chewed on) more widely.

I’m also convinced that good work is of vital importance to those who are doing it as well as to the health of their families, their communities and to the country generally, and that our policy-makers are not grappling at all today with good work’s rotting underbelly.

My hope is that thinking with you about Phelps’ “flourishing economy,” about proposals to survive the future of work, and about Cass’s ideas on work-based investments in families and communities might help to open a wider policy debate as we enter the long, painful slog towards choosing our leaders again.

This post was adapted from my January 27, 2019 newsletter.

Running Into the Future of Work

January 13, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We’ve just entered a new year and it’s likely that many of us are thinking about the opportunities and challenges we’ll be facing in the work weeks ahead. Accordingly, it seems a good time to consider what lies ahead with some forward-thinkers who’ve also been busy looking into the future of our work.

In an end-of-the-year article in Forbes called “Re-Humanizing Work: You, AI and the Wisdom of Elders,” Adi Gaskell links us up with three provocative speeches about where our work is headed and what we might do to prepare for it. As he’s eager to tell us, his perspective on the people we need to be listening to is exactly where it needs to be:

“I am a free range human who believes that the future already exists, if we know where to look. From the bustling Knowledge Quarter in London, it is my mission in life to hunt down those things and bring them to a wider audience. I am an innovation consultant and writer, and…my posts will hopefully bring you complex topics in an easy to understand form that will allow you to bring fresh insights to your work, and maybe even your life.”

I’ve involuntarily enlisted this “free-range human” as my guest curator for this week’s post.

In his December article, Gaskell profiles speeches that were given fairly recently by John Hagel, co-chair of Deloitte’s innovation center speaking at a Singularity University summit in Germany; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz speaking at the Royal Society in London; and Chip Conley an entrepreneur and self-proclaimed “disrupter” speaking to employees at Google’s headquarters last October. In the discussion that follows, I’ll provide video links to their speeches so you can consider what they have to say for yourselves along with “my take-aways” from some of their advice.

We are all running into the future of our work. As the picture above suggests, some are confidently in the lead while others of us (like that poor kid in the red shirt) may simply be struggling to keep up. It will be a time of tremendous change, risk and opportunity and it won’t be an easy run for any of us.

My conviction is that forward movement at work is always steadier when you are clear about your values, ground your priorities in your actions, and remain aware of the choices (including the mistakes) that you’re making along the way. Hagel, Stiglitz and Conley are all talking about what they feel are the next necessary steps along this value-driven path.

1. The Future of Work– August 2017

When John Hagel spoke about the future of work at a German technology summit, he was right to say that most people are gripped by fear. We’re “in the bulls-eye of technology” and paralyzed by the likelihood that our jobs will either be eliminated or change so quickly that we will be unable to hold onto them. However, Hagel goes on to argue (persuasively I think) that the same machines that could replace or reduce our work roles could just as likely become “the catalysts to help us restore our humanity.”

For Hagel, our fears about job elimination and the inability of most workers to avoid this looming joblessness are entirely justified. That’s because today’s economy—and most of our work—is aimed at producing what he calls “scalable efficiency.” This economic model relentlessly drives the consolidation of companies while replacing custom tasks with standardized ones wherever possible for the sake of the bottom line.

Because machines can do nearly everything more efficiently than humans can, our concerns about being replaced by robots and the algorithms that guide them are entirely warranted. And it is not just lower skilled jobs like truckers that will be eliminated en masse. Take a profession like radiology. Machines can already assess the data on x-rays more reliably than radiologists. More tasks that are performed by professionals today will also be performed by machines tomorrow.

Hagel notes that uniquely human aptitudes like curiosity, creativity, imagination, and emotional intelligence are discouraged in a world of scalable efficiency but (of course) it is in this direction that humans will be most indispensible in the future of work. How do we build the jobs of the future around these aptitudes, and do we even want to?

There is a long-standing presumption that most workers don’t want to be curious, creative or imaginative problem-solvers on the job. We’ve presumed that most workers want nothing more than a highly predictable workday with a reliable paycheck at the end of it. But Hagel asks, is this really all we want, or have our educations conditioned us to fit (like replaceable cogs) into an economy that’s based on the scalable efficiency of its workforce? He argues that if you go to any playground and look at how pre-schoolers play, you will see the native curiosity, imagination and inventiveness before it has been bred out of them by their secondary, college and graduate school educations.

So how do companies reconnect us to these deeply human aptitudes that will be most valued in the future of work? Hagel correctly notes that business will never make the massive investment in workforce retraining that will be necessary to recover and re-ignite these problem-solving skills in every worker. Moreover, the drive for scalable efficiency and cost-cutting in most companies will overwhelm whatever initiatives do manage to make it into the re-training room.

Hagel’s alternative roadmap is for companies that are committed to their human workforce to invest in what he calls “the scalable edges” of their business models. These are the discrete parts of any business that have “the potential to become the new core of the institution”—that area where a company is most likely to evolve successfully in the future. Targeted investments in a problem-solving human workforce at these “scalable edges” today will produce a problem-solving workforce that can grow to encompass the entire company tomorrow.

By focusing on worker retraining at a company’s most promising “edges,” Hagel strategically identifies a way to counter the “scalable efficiency” models that will continue to eliminate jobs but refuse to make the investment that’s required to retrain everyone. While traditional jobs will continue to be lost during this transition, and millions of employees will still lose their jobs, Hagel’s approach ensures an eventual future that is powered by human jobs that machines cannot do today and may never be able to do. For him, it’s the fear of machines that drives us to a new business model that re-engages the humanity that we lost in school in the workplace.

I urge you to consider the flow of Hagel’s arguments for yourself. For more of his ideas, a prior newsletter discusses a Harvard Business Review article (which he co-wrote with John Seely Brown) about the benefits of learning that can “scale up.” A closely related post that examines Brown’s commencement address about navigating “the white-water world of work today” can be found here.

*My most important take-aways from Hagel’s talk: Find the most promising, scalable edges of the jobs Im doing. Hone the creative, problem-solving skills that will help me the most in realizing the goals I have set for myself in those jobs. Maintain my continuing value in the workplace by nurturing the skills that machines can never replace.

2. AI and Us– September 2018

Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz begins his talk at London’s Royal Society with three propositions. The first is that artificial intelligence and machine learning are likely to change the labor market in an unprecedented way because of the sheer extent of their disruption. His second proposition is that economic markets do not self-correct in a way that either preserves employment or creates new jobs down the road. His third proposition—and perhaps the most important one—is that there is an inherent “dignity to work” that necessitates government policies that enable everyone who wants to work to have the opportunity to do so.

I agree with each of these propositions, particularly his last one. So if you asked me, the way that Stiglitz was asked by a member of the audience at the end of his talk, about whether he supported governments providing their citizens with “a universal basic income” to offset job elimination as many progressives are proposing, his answer (and mine) would “No.” Instead, we’d argue that governments should be fostering the economic circumstances where everyone who wants to work has the opportunity to do so. It is this opportunity to be productive—and not a new government handout—that rises to the level of basic human right.

Stiglitz argues that new artificial intelligence technologies along with 50 years of hands-off government policies about regulating business (beginning with Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK) have been creating smaller “national pies” that are shared with fewer of their citizens. In a series of charts, he documents the rise of income inequality by showing how wages and economic productivity rose together in most Western economies until the 1980s and have diverged ever since. Labor’s share in the pie has consistently decreased in this timeframe and new technologies like AI are likely to reduce it to even more worrisome levels.

Stiglitz’ proposed solutions include policy making that encourages full employment in addition to fending off inflation, reducing the monopoly power that many businesses enjoy because monopoly restricts the flow of labor, and enacting rules that strengthen workers’ collective bargaining power.

Stiglitz is not a spellbinding speaker, but he is imminently qualified to speak about how the structure of the economy and the policies that maintain it affect the labor markets. You can follow his trains of thought right into the lively Q&A that follows his remarks via the link above. For my part, I’ve been having a continuous conversation about the monopoly power of tech companies like Amazon and the impact of unrestricted power on jobs in newsletter posts like this one from last April as well as on Twitter if you are interested in diving further into the issue.

*My most important take-aways from Stiglitz’ remarks were as follows: since I care deeply about the dignity that work confers, I need (1) to be involved in the political process; (2) to identify and argue in favor of policies that support workers and, in particular, every worker’s opportunity to have a job if she wants one; and (3) to support politicians who advance these policies and oppose those who erroneously claim that when business profits, it follows that we all do.

3.         The Making of a Modern Elder – October 2018

The pictures above suggest the run we’re all on towards the future of work. What these pictures don’t convey as accurately are the ages of the runners. This race includes everyone who either wants or needs to keep working into the future.

Chip Conley’s recent speech at Google headquarters is about how a rapidly aging demographic is disrupting the future workforce and how both businesses and younger workers stand to benefit from it. For the first time in American history, there are more people over age 65 than under age 15. With a markedly different perspective, Conley discusses several of the opportunities for companies when their employees work longer as well as how to improve the intergenerational dynamics when as many as five different generations are working together in the same workplace.

Many of Conley’s insights come from his mentoring of Brian Chesky, the founder of AirBnB, and how he brought what he came to call “elder wisdom” to not only Chesky but also AirBnB’s youthful workforce. Conley begins his talk by referencing our long-standing belief that work teams with gender and race diversity tend to be more successful than less diverse teams, which has led companies to support them. However, Conley notes that only 8% of these same companies actively support age diversity.

To enlist that support, he argues that age diversity adds tremendous value at a time of innovation and rapid change because older workers have both perspective and organizational abilities that younger workers lack. Moreover, these older workers comprise an increasingly numerous group, anywhere from age 35 at some Silicon Valley companies to age 75 and beyond in less entrepreneurial industries. What “value” do these older workers provide, and how do you get employers to recognize it?

Part of the answer comes from a changing career path that no longer begins with learning, peaks with earning, and concludes with retirement. For nearly all workers, your ability to evolve, learn, collaborate and counsel others play roles that are continuously being renegotiated throughout your career. For example, as workers age, they may bring new kinds of value by sharing their institutional knowledge with the group, by understanding less of the technical information but more about how to help the group become more productive, and by asking “why” or “what if” questions instead of “how” or simply “what do we do now” in group discussions. Among other things, that is because older workers spend the first half of their careers accumulating knowledge, skills and experience and the second half editing what they have accumulated (namely what is more and less important) given the perspective they have gained.

When you listen to Conley’s talk, make sure that you stay tuned until the Q&A, which includes some of his strongest insights.

*My most important take-aways from his remarks all involve how older workers can continuously establish their value in the workplace. To do so, older workers must (1) right-size their egos about what they don’t know while maintaining confidence in the wisdom they have to offer; (2) commit to continuous learning instead of being content with what they already know; (3) become more interested and curious instead of assuming that either their age or experience alone will make them interesting; and (4) demonstrate their curiosity publically, listen carefully to where those around them are coming from, and become generous at sharing their wisdom with co-workers privately.  When we do, companies along with their younger workers will come to value their trusted elders.

* * *

This has been a wide-ranging discussion. I hope it has given you some framing devices to think about your jobs as an increasingly disruptive future rushes in your direction. We are all running with the wind in our faces while trying to get the lay of the land below our feet in this brave new world of work.

Note: this post is adapted from my January 13, 2019 newsletter.